Not Every Flower Can Be Turned Into Perfume

Squeeze a jasmine flower. Nothing comes out.

The smell is right there. You can catch it on your fingers. But there is no oil to pour, no drop to collect. Getting that smell out of the flower and into a bottle is the whole job of perfumery.

And with some flowers, the usual method kills the very thing it is trying to save.

The usual way is heat

Put lavender in a copper still and push steam through it. The heat drives the oil out of the plant. The vapour carries it up, you cool it down, and the oil floats to the top of the water. You skim it off. That is essential oil.

The method is old, simple and very good. It works on rose. On cedar and sandalwood. On cinnamon bark and citrus peel. Anything tough enough to take the heat.

Jasmine is not tough.

Some flowers cannot take it

Jasmine and tuberose are built too finely for this. Heat does not release their scent, it wrecks it. What comes out of the still does not smell like the flower. It smells cooked.

They are awkward in every other way too. Pick jasmine after the sun is up and the blossom has already closed and lost half its strength, so it comes off the bush in the dark. Tuberose keeps breathing out scent for hours after you cut it, which means somebody has to deal with it straight away.

And they give up almost nothing. Roughly a tonne of jasmine blossom goes into a single kilo of absolute — every flower picked by hand, one at a time.

So perfumers needed a way to take the scent without ever warming the flower.

They used fat instead

The answer was strange and it worked. Take a sheet of glass, set it in a wooden frame, and spread it with a thin layer of clean, odourless fat. Press fresh petals into it by hand, one by one. Then walk away.

Fat drinks up smell. After a day or two the petals are spent, so you lift them off and lay fresh ones down. Then again. And again, for weeks, until the fat will not take any more.

What you have then is a perfumed grease called a pomade. Wash it with alcohol and the scent finally lets go — pure jasmine, never heated once.

The method has a name: enfleurage. It is, essentially, waiting done properly.

Why almost nobody does it now

Every petal placed by hand. Every petal removed by hand. Weeks per batch, for a few grams at the end of it.

By the middle of the last century, solvents had taken over. They pull the same scent out in hours instead of weeks and cost a fraction as much. Enfleurage survives today mostly in workshops and demonstrations. Almost no perfume on a shelf anywhere is made this way.

What is left of it

The idea, mostly. Some flowers hand over their scent only to whoever is willing to wait, and no machine has ever shortened that wait.

Whispering Flowers is built from that kind of material — hyacinth, narcissus, iris. Flowers that were never easy, and never in a hurry.